Brookse: Yes,there's a Muslim prayer center at West Point. And one at Quantico. Funded by the Pentagon (with our money for God's sake!) Thousands of our military personnel have died in multiple foreign wars! How dare the Pentagon defile the training ground of our hallowed heroes by constructing a location where these American soldier/infidel/bastards can worship? The Horror!

I was thinking that the better mouse trap would be as follows: Give respondents a dollar. Ask them the question. If they get it right, they get another dollar. If they get it wrong, they lose their dollar. If they don't know, they neither win or lose.

I think a lot of those respondents would fumble because they have no idea what is the Koran or Mecca. I agree that a lot of this is just ideological framing, but calling it an "euphemism" implies a certain degree of nuance as to what they really mean. I'd just call it "prejudice."

I'm fairly inclined toward RestrainedRadical's viewpoint on this. Of the 46% of respondents that said Obama was Muslim, if you asked them follow up questions such as "Do you really think he's Muslim, in the sense that he reads the Koran, prays to Mecca, etc.?" that a number of people would fumble and ultimately confess that no, they don't think he's Muslim, they just don't think he shares the same values as they do (values in this case being the preferred euphemism for the ideological prism through which people view the world). Calling him Muslim is as appropriate a slur as anything else.

It’s like when feuding high school girls call each other whores. It’s not that they think there are actually 11th graders performing sexual acts in exchange for money, it’s just an easy way to express hatred for someone. (A lot of political discourse never rises above the level of feuding teenagers).

The pollsters for their part can’t maintain a level of scientific rigor if the questions require subjectively phrased follow up questions, and in any event, they have a certain bias toward releasing poll results with shocking findings.

That said though, I’m sure a certain segment of the population is paranoid enough to believe that Obama is the Muslim Manchurian candidate, just as a certain segment of the population believed Bush engineered 9/11 so he could invade Iraq to steal its oil and resolve his Oedipal complex.

46% of the GOP respondents in the Time poll said that they thought Obama was a Muslim, and 31% said this in the Pew poll. Subtract out 20% and you still get respectively 26% and 11% in each poll saying that they think that Obama is a Muslim.

Everyone's missing the big story: When asked a factual question, 20% of Americans lie to pollsters.

Will pollsters stop asking these questions recognizing the futility, will they redesign the polls to elicit more truthful answers, or will they continue for as long as the public eats up these polls? My money's on the third option.

@ OneAegis: "There seems to be a growing trend of mental "paths;" where if you start to believe one fact (Obama is bad) then you take in hook, line and sinker everything else being fed to you."

I agree, and this same tendency annoyed me during the Bush administration; people seemed to delight in attributing as much malice and corruption to his actions as they could possibly could, even when simple incompetence was the most plausible explanation for many of them.

Of course, as a leftist, I have to bring race into it. Because all the prior white presidents' Christianity was questioned as perception of their job performance dropped.

There seems to be a growing trend of mental "paths;" where if you start to believe one fact (Obama is bad) then you take in hook, line and sinker everything else being fed to you. Can't the man be a terrible President, without being a socialist, pinko Muslim?